


A Complicated Arrangement

by pineapplesquid



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Gen, Gender or Sex Swap, Genderbending, female Thomas Nightingale
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-12
Updated: 2017-07-12
Packaged: 2018-12-01 08:09:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11482233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pineapplesquid/pseuds/pineapplesquid
Summary: Peter Grant is out hunting for a ghost who witnessed a murder when he meets Ms. Frances Nightingale, the last surviving wizard (witch?) in Britain.





	A Complicated Arrangement

**Author's Note:**

> This grew out of what was originally a short conversation about how things might have gone if Nightingale were a woman. Some of the scene and lines are very similar or the same as cannon; some have diverged a lot more. 
> 
> I used the name Frances because it was about as popular as Thomas around the time when Nightingale was born.

At one point a hen party went past, a dozen women in oversized pink t-shirts, bunny ears and high heels. Their pale legs were blotchy with cold. One of them spotted me.

“You’d better go home,” she called. “He’s not coming.”

Her mates shrieked with laughter. I heard one of them complaining that “all the good-looking ones are gay.” 

_At least they didn’t try to go for me_ , is what I was thinking, when I saw the woman watching me from across the Piazza. And look, it’s not like women throw themselves at me on the street all the time, but it wouldn’t have been the first time, is all I’m saying. 

She was tall, about 170—that’s a bit under six foot in old money—and dressed in a tailored suit with a skirt that was somewhat longer than usual, and a well-fitted jacket that emphasized a slim waist and good shoulders. Mid-thirties, I thought, with a long face and brown hair that was pinned up somehow. It was hard to tell in the sodium light, but I though her eyes were grey. She carried a silver-topped cane.

She didn’t look the usual type to be picking up guys on the street after midnight, but when she strolled over to talk to me I started to reconsider that assumption.

“Hello,” she said. Her voice was soft, but with a proper RP accent, like the lady of the manor in a costume drama. “What are you up to?”

I’m not going to lie, she wasn’t all that much older than me and wasn’t bad looking as these things go, and under other circumstances I might have gone along with it. But I didn’t much feel like that tonight, so I decided to go with the truth. “I’m ghost-hunting,” I said.

“Interesting,” she said. “Any particular ghost?”

“Nicholas Wallpenny,” I said.

“Hmm,” she said. “Why?”

Unless I wanted to admit that I was police—which I didn’t—that was a slightly harder one to answer. “I think he may have seen something that happened here,” I answered after a minute.

She nodded at that, apparently not surprised. This was not exactly the conversation I’d expected to have. “Who are you?” she asked.

No Londoner ever answers a question like that unchallenged. “Nobody in particular,” I said instead.

She just nodded again. “Well, then, carry on,” she said calmly. “Although, if it does turn out that Mr. Wallpenny saw something, I’d be interested to hear what it was.”

“I—I’m sorry, what?”

She reached into a pocket and produced a card, which I accepted automatically. I tilted it towards the light, and saw that it read “F. Nightingale, consultant,” with a London phone number as the only contact info. “I’d be interested to hear what he witnessed,” she repeated calmly.

“Um, sure,” I managed. She gave me a strange, small smile, and turned, strolling back up James Street.

**

The CPU was, well, the CPU. It took about an hour for them to get me set up with a computer and a stack of paperwork, and less than that for me to figure out how to do it in half the time that they clearly expected it to take. I surveyed my now-clear desk, contemplated finding someone to ask for more to do, and pulled out my phone instead.

“Yeah?” Lesley answered, sounding distracted.

“What are you up to?” I asked.

“Doing data entry on a HOLMES terminal.”

“Funny,” I said, “Me too.”

“I figured that. What do you want?”

“Wanted to know how your first day on the Murder Team was going,” I said innocently. The long pause told me that Lesley wasn’t buying it. “Also, I met someone last night. Who was really interested in my ghost.”

“Peter, please tell me you did not try to pick up a woman by telling you were looking for a ghost who witnessed a murder,” Lesley said, sounding disgusted.

“I wasn’t trying to pick her up!” I protested. “And I didn’t tell her about the murder, just that I was looking for a ghost.”

“Jesus, Peter." 

“She asked me to call her if Nicholas told me anything else.”

“If this ghost told you anything about an ongoing murder investigation, you can’t go telling a woman about it just to try to get into her pants.”

“I’m not—I don’t want to sleep with her, I just thought it was weird that she was so interested. Maybe she knows something about ghosts and could help me figure out how to find Nicholas again, ask him some more questions. But I dunno. . . ”

There was another disgusted pause. “You’re sitting right at a HOLMES terminal, and you know her name. Run a background check on her. And then do me a favor, and don’t ever call her, because ghosts don’t exist, and even if they did you could never use one as an admissible eyewitness.”

As always, it was obvious once she’d said it. I was spared the necessity of thanking her, though, since she’d hung up.

I didn’t, actually, know her first name, but Nightingale wasn’t exactly a common last name, and it didn’t take very long to find records for a Frances Nightingale. There wasn’t all that much, though—she’d apparently never had a driver’s license, never been arrested, or done much of anything else that left an official paper trail. One item in her spotty work record did catch my attention, though. _Bingo_ , I thought. She was on record as an occasional civilian consultant for the Metropolitan Police.

**

Tokyo A Go Go, the restaurant where Ms. Nightingale had asked me to meet her when I’d called the number on the card, was a bento place halfway down New Row. I made my way inside, past the minimalist Japanese furniture, and spotted Nightingale sitting at a back table. She smiled at me, and asked if I was hungry as soon as I’d taken the other chair. I nodded and distractedly ordered something when the waitress came by.

Nightingale asked me if I minded if she kept eating, barely pausing for my affirmative. “And did he come back?”

“Who?”

“Your ghost,” she said. “Nicholas Wallpenny, I think you said it was.”

“Oh. Uh. No, he didn’t." 

She shook her head. “Ghosts really aren’t very reliable, I’m afraid, although they can be useful if you can manage to get a coherent statement out of them.” 

I stared at her. “Are you telling me ghosts are real?”

She met my eyes squarely. “Weren’t you just telling me that you’d talked to one?”

“Well, yeah, but. . .” I’d taken the whole thing weirdly in stride so far, but it was still a shock to hear this apparently sane woman talking about them so calmly.

“Ghosts are real.” 

“Ok,” I said slowly. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but who are you? Consultants with the Met aren’t generally the kind of people who believe in ghosts.”

She frowned faintly. “Yes, I’ve worked with the Met on occasion—sergeant?”

“Constable,” I corrected her automatically.

“Constable Grant,” she continued. “Although mostly not officially. I occasionally consult on some of the more. . . esoteric cases.”

I stared at her. “So is this the part where you tell me that you’re part of some shadowy organization who works in secret with the Met to deal with ghosts, ghouls, faeries, demons, witches and warlocks, elves and goblins. . . ?” I said. “You can stop me before I run out of supernatural creatures.”

“Well, there isn’t much of a shadowy organization. It’s just me, I’m afraid. And mostly the Met tries to have nothing to do with me. But otherwise, yes. 

“Are you telling me that all of those things are real?”

“You haven’t even scratched the surface,” said Nightingale.

“But what—what do you do?” I asked. 

“I try to keep the peace,” she said. “Between the _demi-monde_ and the rest of the city.”

“The demi-what?”

“The _demi-monde_ ,” she said impatiently. “I suppose you’d call them the—the magical community.”

“So. . . why did you want to talk to me?”

“If someone is murdering people with magic,” she said, “then it is definitely my—how would you put it? My ‘patch’. Whether or not the Met wants my help, they’re not going to be able to deal with it in any mundane fashion." 

Faint warning bells went off at this—my career wasn’t exactly down the tubes or anything, but it wasn’t at a point where I wanted to piss off half my superiors, either. But I’d talked to a ghost the other night, and almost nothing could have dragged me away now. “You think the murders were done with _magic_?”

“Why don’t you tell me what your witness had to say,” she said, “and then we’ll see where it goes.”

So I told her what Nicholas Wallpenny had told me, and what I’d seen on the video. “It’s definitely something supernatural,” Nightingale said, frowning, when I was done. “I wish I could have gotten a look at the body.”

“It looked like he just knocked his head off, nothing fancy,” I said. “I mean, it was weird, it should be impossible, but not complicated. Forensics will have been all over it, I could take a look at the HOLMES report for you, if you wanted." 

“HOLMES?” she asked, then waved me aside before I could answer. “Never mind. There are things I could learn from the body that nobody in the police is going to find. A friend of mine at UCH is going to try to take a look, but it’s not the same as seeing for myself.”

I was just as happy not to be heading to the morgue, but I kept that to myself. I did wonder, if there were other magical crimes going on, why she didn’t have a better arrangement with the Met. I kept that thought to myself too.

“You were guarding the scene, and you saw the video,” said Nightingale. “Can you find the exact spot where it happened?”

I agreed that I thought I could, and she dropped a few bills on the table and stood. “If  you have a few more minutes, we could go take a look right now.”

She steered me back towards St. Paul’s, over to the west portico. I glanced around to orient myself, and tried to picture the video of the murder in my head. It made me a little nauseous, to be honest, picturing a man getting his head knocked off right where I was standing, and I was beginning to regret all the cold rice I’d just eaten. “Here,” I said, when I was as sure as I could be of the spot. “I think it was right here." 

“Excellent,” said Nightingale. She dropped right to her knees on the stones, lowering her face towards them while I hovered uncomfortably. She moved a few inches in one direction, and then in another, before freezing for a long moment. “Yes, good,” she said, and looked up at me. “Come here.”

I knelt awkwardly next to her, trying to ignore the looks we were getting. “Get as close to the stones as you can, and tell me what you feel,” she said.

“I’m sorry, what? What am I looking for?”

“The uncanny,” she said. “It always leaves a trace.”

I still didn’t know what I was doing, but Nightingale was watching me impatiently, so I bent my face towards the stones. For a moment, I couldn’t feel anything, but then, gradually, I could. Mostly, it was the kinds of feelings that were familiar from working late weekend nights on the street, but stronger, and more personal—yelling, anger, the way it feels when you want to keep hitting the guy in front of you until he just stops moving. It was all accompanied by a high mad laugh, and something else. Hair, and a musty smell, wagging, and high pitched barking. “A dog,” I said. “There’s a little dog.”

Nightingale nodded. “And what else?” 

“Violence,” I said. “And laughter.”

“Yes,” she agreed.

“But what—what is that?”

“Like I said,” Nightingale said, “the uncanny always leaves a trace. Think of it like an afterimage of a bright light. It’s called a _vestigium_.”

“ _Vestigium_ ,” I repeated. “So, can you always tell when someone’s—what, done magic somewhere?”

“Mmm,” she said. “It doesn’t last forever. Some things hold it better than others—fortunately, stone is one of them. You could probably still feel it on the body, but I expect it would be quite weak by now.”

I still wasn’t quite sure what to make of all this. “So this _vestigium_ tells you something about the kind of magic that was used.”

“Hopefully, yes. In this case, I believe it means that we need to locate a dog." 

I stared at her. “So we need to search London to try to find one specific dog?" 

“I’m afraid so.”

“Can’t you do it with—with magic, or something?”

“No,” she said decidedly. “Or at least, not with any spell I can think of right now.”

“But—“ the implication of her words sank in. “You really can do magic?”

“Oh, yes,” said Nightingale.

_Fuck me_ , I thought. _She’s a witch_. I really wanted to ask her to show me some, but it seemed like it might be a bit rude, plus we were still kneeling on the ground in the middle of Covent Garden.

Nightingale looked down at her watch, and levered herself to her feet. “You had better get back to work,” she said, offering me a hand up. She gave me a long look. “If you want to know what I find out from Abdul at the UCH, you’re welcome to come by after your shift,” she said neutrally.

I nodded, trying not to look too eager. “Yeah, sure, I guess.”

She pulled a notebook out of a pocket, wrote down an address, tore the page off, and handed it to me. “I’ll tell Molly to expect you,” she said, somewhat cryptically. “This evening, then,” she said, and turned to stroll away up Paternoster Row.

_What have I gotten myself into now?_ I wondered.

** 

I still showed up in Russel Square at 6:00, of course. The building that Nightingale had indicated was one of a line of Georgian terraces, most of which had been carved up into flats. The one I was looking for turned out to be noticeably larger and finer than its neighbors. There was no apartment number on the address, and no sign of separate entrances, although it would be an unusually large place for just one person. Or maybe two—she’d mentioned another woman, after all, and I wasn’t going to make any assumptions. I supposed, for all I knew, there would be a big pack of kids too.

The staircase—in better shape than any of its neighbors—led up to big double mahogany doors. Carved into the stone above them were the words Scientia Potestas Est. I frowned at the for a moment, but couldn’t figure out what they said. I was still turning over possibilities—Science Portends East?—when I rang the doorbell.

The doors opened by themselves, silently, which honestly didn’t seem like a good sign. I walked in anyway. What else was I going to do? 

The lobby in which I stood was clearly not that of a private residence. Near the door was a wooden and glass booth that strongly suggested that anyone walking in should stop and sign in, although there wasn’t actually a book on the counter. Beyond it, further into the lobby, was a statue on a plinth. Newton, I could tell, even before I got close enough to read the inscription, which had his name and date of birth on it.

“Welcome to the Folly,” Nightingale said, which was when I noticed that she was standing next to the statue. “Or what’s left of it.”

“What is this place?” I asked.

“The official home of English magic,” she said. “Or, at least, it used to be. These days that’s more of a technicality.”

“And what’s Sir Isaac Newton got to do with it?”

Nightingale smiled. “He’s credited with systemizing modern magic. After which he founded the Folly.”

“Huh,” I said. “I thought that he invented modern science.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “He did both. I suppose that’s the nature of genius. Come on through.” She led me through a door, which opened into a large atrium. It was open through several stories to the glass dome of the roof; this building wasn’t small, and it definitely hadn’t been divided up into apartments. I did a quick mental calculation, and had to stop myself from whistling out loud. If this place was Nightingale’s, she was worth a lot more than most police consultants were. 

“Oh,” Nightingale said, a little awkwardly, pausing halfway down the atrium. “I can either ask Molly to bring us some tea, or if you want to wait a bit longer you’re welcome to stay for dinner. There’s always plenty of food.”

I thought briefly about the horrors that awaited me in the section house kitchen, and the fact that I was actually getting a bit sick of the kebab place across the street. “Dinner would be great, thanks,” I said, sounding a bit stilted myself.

“Good,” she said, then turned over her shoulder to call out. “Molly?”

Another woman appeared through another doorway, gliding towards us over the marble floor. She was dressed in an old-fashioned Edwardian maid’s uniform, with a full black skirt topped by a starched white apron. The uniform didn’t fit with her face, which was long and sharp-boned, or her long loose black hair. I tried not to stare, but it was hard. Especially with my primitive hindbrain screaming that if I turned away from her, it might be the last thing I ever did.

“Constable Grant, this is Molly. She does for me.”

_Does what_? I wondered. “Call me Peter,” I said generally to both of them, with a cringe-worthy little wave to accompany.

Nightingale nodded acknowledgement of this. “Peter will be dining with us,” she told Molly.

Molly raised her eyebrows slightly, looking back and forth between us. Nightingale just looked back coolly, and after a moment Molly dropped her gaze, turning to glide off back through the door she’d just come to.

“It’ll be about half an hour or so,” said Nightingale. “Come on through to the reading room.”

I followed her past a number of closed doors, wondering what was behind them, until we got to one that she opened. It revealed a pleasant room, with armchairs and sofas scattered about, and bookshelves lining the walls. I wanted to take a look at some of the books, but she gestured me towards one of the chairs, and then sat across from me.

“Who lives here?” I asked. “I mean, this place looks like it could hold—“

“Several dozen,” she said. “Comfortably. More in a pinch. Not counting the servants, of course.”

Of course.

“It’s just me and Molly now,” she said.

“Why?” I asked. “I mean, what happened to everyone else?”

She looked past me. “They died,” she said distantly. “Or retired, some of them.” 

I really, really wanted to know more, but Nightingale clearly didn’t want to keep talking about it, and I’m not that rude of a guest. “So, um, did you hear from that friend of yours?”

She nodded. “He said that the _vestigia_ on the body was weak, but he thought there was an animal of some kind, maybe a dog. I don’t think the rest of it was strong enough for him to sense, but I’m quite sure it was the same as what we found at the scene.”

“So. . .” I said. “The dog’s definitely important, then.”

“I imagine so,” she agreed. “I’ll have to find it somehow.”

I’d been considering it on and off all afternoon, but I still hadn’t come up with any way to find a specific unnamed dog in London. I’d checked the HOLMES report, and there wasn’t any mention of finding a pet at William Skirmish’s place. Asking someone on the Murder Team might lead to some more leads, but I hadn’t come up with a decent excuse as to why I’d be interested yet.

“The victim’s name was released on the news this afternoon,” Nightingale observed. “I’m sure his apartment has been secured.”

“It’s standard,” I agreed.

“Still, I thought perhaps a visit to the area tomorrow might turn up something new.” She paused. In a rare moment of prudence, I kept my mouth shut. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go with her. It’s just that it was still my first week properly on the job, and I didn’t think that going to hunt for a dog we probably wouldn’t find was worth the risk of getting a bollocksing if someone saw me.

She must have known what I was thinking, because she was looking at me more seriously. “Peter,” she said. “I don’t want to get you into trouble, or doing anything you’re not comfortable with.”

Perversely, that just made me feel more inclined to stick around. “It’s not breaking any rules to visit someone for dinner." 

“Still,” said Nightingale. “There are plenty of officers in the Met who would take a dim view of you associating with me.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “I won’t do anything that’ll be a problem.” She looked unconvinced, but the appearance of Molly, hovering silently in the doorway, stopped her from protesting further. 

Nightingale showed me back down the hall and into a dining room full of tables—it must have been able to seat more than fifty people, and all of the places were set. Nightingale looked around in some astonishment, too. “Molly must be excited about having a guest,” she said quietly. “It’s been rather a while since I’ve seen it like this.”

I could picture it, somehow, with all of the tables bare or shrouded in dust sheets except for one, set for a single place. It was a rather sad image, and I hoped that “rather a while” hadn’t actually been all that long. I also wondered how Molly could have done all this in the twenty or so minutes since Nightingale told her I’d be staying.

“Having people over can be like that,” I said, somewhat at random, and sat where Nightingale gestured. Molly started bringing in the food—a roast and potatoes, it looked like, along with bread, and something with vegetables. Good, solid, boarding-school type food, but it smelled good and I hadn’t had to cook it, so I wasn’t going to complain. There was also a _lot_ more than two people needed.

After Molly had set it out and left Nightingale surveyed the table, lips quirked. “Please,” she said, “help yourself.”

The food was pretty good, if a bit bland by my mother’s standards. The silence felt awkward after a minute, though, and I found myself trying to come up with something to say. “So, um,” I started. “There used to be a lot more—“ Wait, I didn’t even know what the right word was. “People? Witches, or wizards, or—“

“Wizards,” Nightingale rescued me, looking amused. “Or the more general term is practitioner.”

“Right, wizards.” Sure. At least that would go over better than witches if my mother ever heard anything about this. Not that I was planning on telling her. “Are there any others?”

“No,” Nightingale said. “At least, not in Britain.” 

She didn’t elaborate. There wasn’t much else I could ask that wouldn’t get too close to the earlier question about how they’d all died out, anyway, and Nightingale obviously hadn’t wanted to talk any more about that. It was also occurring to me that I hadn’t seen any actual magic. Sure, I’d spoken to what I would swear was a ghost, but the only evidence I had that Nightingale was a wizard—practitioner—whatever—was a casual reference to doing a spell. It wasn’t exactly conclusive.

  
I hadn’t told Lesley where I was going, because I didn’t want her to yell at me. It was also occurring to me that maybe that hadn’t been my best plan ever. It wasn’t that Nightingale seemed likely to try to murder me—and after a while you do start to get a sense for these things. It’s just that by the time you have the sense, you also know that there are also occasionally times that you really just can’t tell. There are plenty of murderers who seem like really lovely people. Lesley really was going to be pissed at me when I told her about this later.

“So, you’re a wizard?” I asked.

“There’s been some debate about that,” Nightingale said. Whatever that meant.

“But—you can do magic?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

“Oh, yes,” she said. She looked at me, and smiled. Then she held out her hand, holding my gaze.

She opened her hand, saying something quietly as she did. A globe of bright white light appeared in her palm. There definitely hadn’t been anything in her hand before, at least not that I could see. I started to get up, then stopped, afraid I was being rude. Nightingale grinned, though, and gestured me over. 

I scooted out from my chair and bent to look more closely. It was definitely just sitting in her hand, with no external power source that I could find. I couldn’t feel any heat coming from it. Nightingale let me look for another minute and then said another word. This time I was close enough to hear—it sounded something like “yak-twos”, and definitely wasn’t English. The globe of light floated up off her hand, bobbing gently in mid-air. I took a good look around it, but I couldn’t see any wires or anything holding it up. 

“Wow,” I said. “You really can do magic.”

Nightingale closed her hand, and the light disappeared. “Don’t look at it too long,” she said, as I blinked away dark spots in my vision. “It’s brighter than you think.”

“Wow,” I said again, and then wished I hadn’t. “So, what other kinds of spells are there?" 

“Quite a number,” Nightingale said. “Rather more than I could show you in one evening, even if it were safe to do so.”

I wanted to ask what made it so dangerous, but the other thing seemed more important. “So, did someone use a spell to kill Skirmish? And what was that, um, vestigial—“

“ _Vestigium_ ,” Nightingale corrected. “A _vestigium_ is what’s left behind after someone uses magic.”

“So it was a spell,” I said.

“Or something of the kind,” Nightingale agreed.  “Not necessarily used to kill him, but performed at that location. And no, before you ask me, I don’t know which one, or how it was done.”

“How about who did it?” I asked.

“Not that either, I’m afraid,” said Nightingale.

“You said there weren’t any other wizards.”

“No,” said Nightingale. “But there are other. . . things, around. Like your ghost.”

I wondered if she was talking about things that were things, or things that were people, just different. Nicholas, I thought, would belong in the second category. “Look, if someone’s killing people with magic, is the murder team going to be able to catch them?”

Nightingale looked grave. “I’m afraid I really don’t know.”

I had plenty to think about as I walked back to the section house that night. Probably, I should have been worrying about how the Met was going to catch a magical murderer. Or, maybe even more pressingly, whether I was going crazy. But mostly my mind was stuck, replaying the moment when Nightingale had opened her hand and there had been light. Magic.

**

The next evening when I stepped into the Folly, the stillness of the lobby was broken by the sound of frantically clicking toenails. A small dog—something in the terrier line—ran huffing towards me, bringing a musty smell with it. It stopped a few feet away, sank back on its haunches, and started barking steadily at me.

Following it was Molly, gliding much more elegantly towards me. I fought back the urge to turn and run, and smiled at her instead. “Is Nightingale around?” I asked.

Molly nodded and silently took my coat. Nightingale appeared at the other end of the lobby, apparently drawn by the noise of the dog. “Ah, Peter,” she said. “Good evening.”

“You found the dog,” I said.

“Yes,” said Nightingale. “He was being kept by a neighbor. Toby, quiet.”

The dog kept barking. Nightingale looked at it, sighed, and then murmured something under her breath. Abruptly it turned, walked over to the statue of Isaac, and fell asleep leaning against its base.

I was too distracted by the realization that holy shit, that was more _magic_ , to really appreciate the silence. “It’s a noisy little thing,” Nightingale grumbled.

“Why did you bring it back here?” I asked.

“It was clearly tied up in the vestigia. I thought it might be helpful to have it available.”

It was almost impossible to imagine Nightingale taking care of the little beast, much less being seen in public with it. Maybe Molly was doing all the walks.

Toby stirred and whuffled in his sleep. “Was that magic?” I asked. “What you did to him? Can you do that anything, just make it go to sleep?”

Nightingale blinked at me. “Yes, it was. And no, not exactly—it works best on small animals, and not well on humans.”

“Why not?” I asked. “Most other mammals sleep like we do, there’s no real reason that a spell that would work on a dog wouldn’t work on a person. Unless it’s a size thing, but then it should still work on babies. So what’s so different about humans?”

“I don’t know,” said Nightingale.

“Have you tried it on a baby?”

She actually seemed to color a bit at that. “Once,” she admitted. “Really?” I asked, slightly surprised. “Why? Did it work?” 

“My sister had asked me to watch her infant, and it wouldn’t stop crying,” she said. “I got a bit desperate. It wasn’t particularly effective, though.”

Toby growled in his sleep, legs paddling, and I wondered what the definition of “effective” was. “And what about an adult?” I asked. “What would happen if you cast it on me right now?”

“I’m not entirely sure,” said Nightingale. “But before you suggest trying any such thing, I assume there was another reason you came by this evening?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said, reminded. “I mostly just wanted to see if you’d had any luck with the dog.”

“As you can see, I did find it.”

“Any ideas why Toby was so important in the _vestigium_?”

Nightingale frowned. “I’m not entirely certain. He was staying with the neighbor because there had been an incident where he’d bitten a gentleman several weeks ago. Which I suppose could be a motive for murder, although it strikes me as a little extreme.” 

Having done my probationary period on the nighttime streets of London, it didn’t seem all that unusual to me. If whatever poor bugger had been bitten had done Skirmish in right there, it would have made a strange kind of sense. Waiting a couple of weeks, that was the weird part.

This was the point when—as was pointed out to me later, repeatedly, and a high volume—I should have left well enough alone. Information is supposed to flow from civilians to the police, after all. Not the other way around.

Instead, I phoned a mate of mine from Hendon, and asked him what he knew about recent dog attacks on Hampstead Heath.

**

“Do you really think he murdered a guy because the dog bit him?” Lesley asked me as we drove towards _Street_. “Two weeks later?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I think the dog might be important.”

“Right,” she said. “Because some woman’s magical ESP told you it was.”

I thought about trying to explain the _vestigium_ again, but it didn’t sound all that much better than “magical ESP” in my head, so I didn’t try. “I don’t know for sure,” I said, “but it’s got to be worth looking into.”

“I’m here, aren’t I,” Lesley said grumpily.

She was searching for a parking spot when I got distracted by a seriously nice car that had just pulled into the closest space. It was a classic Jaguar Mark 2, with the 3.8 liter engine, if I was any judge. I was so focused by the car that it took me a minute to realize that the person getting out of it was Nightingale. “Oh, shit,” I said quietly. 

“What is it?” Lesley asked, looking up instantly to scan the area.

“Nightingale,” I said. “She’s here.” 

“What?” snapped Lesley. “You told her?”

“I didn’t tell her we were coming here!” I said defensively. Lesley kept glaring at me. “I may have mentioned Coopertown’s name.”

“Peter, don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re an idiot,” Lesley said. “Come on, we can’t let her get in there.”

Nightingale wasn’t actually going up to the house, but had turned and was watching us as we parked. “Good morning, Peter,” she said when she saw me get out of the car, and then more guardedly as Lesley came into view, “Ah.”

“Hi,” I said. “Um, this is PC Lesley May. Lesley, this is, um—“

“Frances Nightingale,” Nightingale interjected. “A pleasure to meet you, Constable May.”

Lesley didn’t return the pleasantry, just nodded. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to ask you to leave—“ she started.

A sudden flare of _something_ —emotions, but solid enough to feel against your skin—burst out of the house. Screaming, laughter, the roar of the mob. A moment later, we heard a window breaking and a woman screaming.

“Constable, wait—“ Nightingale started, but both Lesley and I had already turned and were moving towards the house. 

“Stay here,” Lesley snapped over her shoulder, although I didn’t think Nightingale was going to listen.

We both stopped thinking about that when we saw the scrap of white lying on the lawn.

**

Lesley and I stood together outside, shivering, for what felt like an eternity until we heard the whine of the approaching sirens. Nightingale stood a small distance away, holding a handkerchief to the cut on her forehead. It must have happened when Coopertown threw her against the wall, I thought, and made a note to mention a possible head injury to someone. The thought, along with everything else, seemed rather distant.

The paramedics arrived first and rushed over to the baby, beginning resuscitation procedures. They were followed a minute later by a van full of uniforms. The sergeant approached us cautiously and asked if we were ok, and if we could tell him what happened.

Nightingale started to speak, but changed her mind, making a minute gesture towards me. “We’ve had an, um, serious incident,” I said, pulling out my warrant card and flashing it at him. “There are two bodies in the house. I don’t think anyone else was in there, but we didn’t check the back yet.” We should have, I realized, but honestly it hadn’t occurred to me until that moment. 

The sergeant nodded and strode off, barking orders. Lesley and I stood there for a little while longer. After a bit someone brought us, and Nightingale, blankets and well-sugared tea, which we enjoyed standing behind the transit van. I did notice that one of the uniforms had been told off to keep an eye on Nightingale—I guess, as the only living civilian at the scene, she was a logical suspect.

It took less than forty minutes for DCI Seawoll to arrive, which meant he must have used the blues and twos the whole way down. He appeared around the back of the van, looking at us. “You two all right?” he asked. We nodded. “Well, don’t fucking go anywhere,” he said. He turned to look at Nightingale. “And what the fuck are you doing at my crime scene?” he demanded.

“I happened to be here—independently of Constables Grant and May—before the incident began,” Nightingale said. 

“I don’t want to fucking hear it,” said Seawoll. “You, especially, don’t fucking go anywhere.”

Nightingale nodded, and we all sat in silence for a while longer. Eventually someone came to escort us all, individually, to the forensics tents, where we surrendered our clothing. Somehow Nightingale looked dignified even in a paper bunny suit. I wondered if I’d ever see my jacket again.

We sat in the transit van for a while longer, getting hungrier and hungrier, until Seawoll returned. He climbed into the front seat, turning around to look at us. “We’re going to Hampstead Nick,” he said. “Where you two—“ he gestured as Lesley and me—“are going to be statemented, separately, by a nice lady from Scotland Yard. And you—“ pointing at Nightingale—“are going to give a statement too. But I want to make it perfectly clear that, regardless of what you may have seen, there are to no weird bollocks mentioned anywhere. Is that clear?” 

_Is he asking us to lie to a superior officer?_ I thought. Lesley and I both nodded. Seawoll turned his attention to Nightingale. “Is that clear? No funny business in your statement. I don’t care what you think you saw.” 

“This isn’t my first time with one of your cases, Inspector,” Nightingale said coolly.

“Yeah, and every time you show up, you turn my life into a fucking nightmare,” said Seawoll. “And after you give your official statement, we are going back to _my_ nick, where we’ll be having a nice conversation about what the fuck you were doing here in the first place.” 

Lesley and I fed a combination of truths and lies to the detective from Scotland Yard, making sure our stories didn’t match too closely. Hers was easier, I think; she hadn’t seen what had happened inside. I made up some stuff about him going berserk, and how I thought he had hit his face really hard on the banister, and then again on the stairs as he fell down them. I did try to make it clear that Nightingale hadn’t done any of it, because I knew some bastard somewhere had already thought of it. 

Finished with that duty, we found Seawoll waiting for us in a too-small plastic chair, holding a styrofoam cup of coffee. I knew without trying it that it was terrible, but it had been an early morning, and I still wanted some for myself. He didn’t offer to let us go get our own, though, just jerked his head at a pair of chairs across from him. I guessed that he was still pissed at us.

We sat for about fifteen minutes before Nightingale arrived, escorted by another detective. Seawoll glared and rounded us all up into another van, where we sat in awkward silence until we were in a conference room back at Belgravia nick. “You,” Seawoll growled, jabbing a finger at first Nightingale, “what the hell were you doing at the crime scene?”

Nightingale leaned back against the table, but didn’t sit. “Brandon Coopertown,” she said, “was recently bitten by William Skirmish’s dog.”

Seawoll stared at her. “And how would you know that?”

“A neighbor of Mr. Skirmish’s was keeping the dog,” Nightingale said. I appreciated the cover, but I wasn’t sure it was going to help much. Seawoll had turned and glared at me anyway, despite my best innocent face. “I spoke to her—“

“You went poking around Skirmish’s flat too?” Seawoll was getting properly steamed, now. “Thought my detectives couldn’t be doing a good enough job there?”

“There is every indication that Mr. Skirmish was murdered using ma—“

“Don’t fucking say that word,” Seawoll interrupted her. “I don’t want to fucking hear you say the fucking m-word.”

“Fine,” Nightingale said. “Using supernatural—“ 

“None of that either,” said Seawoll.

“Very well, what would you like me to call it?” Nightingale snapped.

“I don’t want you to call it a damn thing,” Seawoll said. “I don’t want any of your voodoo mystic nonsense interfering with my nice, clean murder investigation!”

“With all respect, Inspector,” said Nightingale icily, “the language I use will not change the fact that this crime was committed using—other methods. Nor will yelling at me.”

“Every time you come around here, a case turns into shit,” said Seawoll. “And I’m not having that happen this time.”

“If you can find a rational explanation for how a man knocked another’s head clean off his shoulders with one blow, or for what happened to Brandon Coopertown, feel free,” said Nightingale. There was color mounting in her cheeks. “But these crimes are not—mundane.”

“I don’t want to hear any of it,” Seawoll said.

“It doesn’t matter what you want,” said Nightingale. “Someone is out there murdering people with magic—“

“Don’t—“

“Three people are dead already, including an _infant_ , and no matter how good your detectives are at solving ordinary crimes, they can’t deal with this one!”

“My detectives,” Seawoll growled, “are the best in London, and I am not going to have you running around, interfering with them. I don’t want you anywhere near my investigation.”

“Inspector,” Nightingale said. “In cases such as this, there has historically been a certain amount of partnership—“

“You,” Seawoll jabbed a finger at her, “Are not our partner—“

“Cooperation, then,” Nightingale said. She was sounding faintly desperate, which was not reassuring me. “As a purely civilian consultant—“

“No,” Seawoll rumbled. “The last thing we need around this case is you and your fucking mumbo-jumbo. I don’t care who you think you are, you’re not police, and I don’t want you interfering with my investigation. I see you around any of my scenes or suspects again, I’ll have you arrested. Is that clear?”

“Yes,” Nightingale said shortly. “You are perfectly clear.”

“You can find your way out,” Seawoll grumbled, watching as Nightingale walked calmly out of the room. “And you two,” he growled at us. “You stay away from that woman, if you know what’s good for you.” 

Lesley and I nodded, and stood to make our escape. Seawoll shook his head at me. “Not so fast, Grant,” he said, even as Lesley made it out the door. “You and I are going to have a conversation about how much information you share with random civilians who happen to catch your eye.” 

**

After all of that, I rather fancied Japanese for lunch, I told myself. We’d both been given compassionate leave for the rest of the day—stay out of sight and don’t make the news, really—but Lesley had buggered off somewhere while I was getting yelled at, so I was on my own.

I strolled into Tokyo a Go Go to find Nightingale sitting at the table where she’d met me before. I abandoned pretense and made a beeline for her.

“Peter,” she said, setting down her chopsticks and gesturing for me to sit. “Do you want any food?”

I thought about it and found that no, I really didn’t. I shook my head. “What happened back there?” I asked.

Nightingale sighed, and looked down at her hands. “I’m afraid I’m not entirely sure.”

“Don’t give me that,” I snapped. “That—what happened back there, it wasn’t normal.”

“No,” Nightingale agreed. “It wasn’t.”

“And if it was magic, that’s apparently your responsibility,” I said sharply. “Or at least that’s what you keep saying. So I want to know, what happened?”

 “I don’t know everything, but I have some information.” She looked pointedly towards where my plate would be. “I’m not sure if it’s really mealtime—“

“Just tell me.”

Nightingale was still staring down at her hands. “They’ve completed the preliminary autopsy,” she said. “A friend of mine got a look at the results.”

“And?”

“Basically,” said Nightingale, “Coopertown’s face fell off.” 

I stared at her. “His face fell off?”

“Essentially,” Nightingale said. “I believe I know how it was done. It’s an old spell, called d _issimulo_.” 

“What does it do?” I asked. I still didn’t really have a good sense of how many spells there were—I’d only seen a couple, and none of them were anything like what had happened in the Coopertown house that morning.

“It—it’s a method of disguise,” she said. “It re-shapes the bones of the face.”

“He looked like his photos,” I said dubiously.

“I believe the spell was performed some time earlier,” said Nightingale. “His face was then re-shaped to its original form.” 

“And then what happened?” I asked suspiciously.

“Once the magic ran out, there was nothing holding it together,” Nightingale said. It was a simple statement, but I could imagine it well enough, and I was particularly glad that I hadn’t eaten anything.

“So, it just. . . fell off,” I said stupidly. “Wait,” I said, suddenly realizing. “What would it have looked like? When the spell had changed it?”

Nightingale frowned. “I’m not entirely sure,” she said. “Abdul said that the skin and muscle had been stretched—“ she saw my face, and cut herself off. “He suggested that it had been pushed outward,” she said instead.

“At the jaw,” I said. “And nose.”

“Yes,’ Nightingale said. “How—“

“The murderer,” I said. “The one who killed William Skirmish. They thought it was a mask, but it wasn’t. It was Coopertown.”

Nightingale nodded slowly. “Yes,” she said. “That would agree with what we’ve seen so far.”

Well, that was one case potentially solved. “But what happened to Coopertown?” I asked.

“Ah,” said Nightingale. “Abdul also had something to say about that. He managed to take some brain samples. They exhibited a particular pattern of severe degradation.” 

I thought about that a moment. “He had some kind of degenerative disease? Could it have made him unstable?”

“Not exactly.” Nightingale reached into a folder that was lying on the table next to her, and drew out a photo. Even I could recognize that it was part of a brain—but I was pretty sure that a healthy brain looked less like a sponge. “That,” said Nightingale, “is your brain on magic.” 

“Doing magic does that to your brain?” I asked, incredulous. I took a surreptitious look at her. She didn’t look like someone who’s brain had been turned into a cauliflower.

“Doing _too much_ magic does that to your brain,” she corrected. “Abdul calls it hyperthamaturgical degradation.”

“And he thinks that’s what did in Coopertown?”

Nightingale nodded. “The strain of keeping the _dissimulo_ going would inevitably have caused severe damage. When it got to a certain point, he lost control of the spell, which is probably what actually killed him.”

It was a grim little picture, but it made sense. “But what made Coopertown attack—his family?”

“That,” Nightingale said grimly, “is what I don’t know.”

We sat in silence for a long minute, as I rapidly considered and rejected possibilities for convincing the murder team that canvassing theater shops for masks was a waste of time. _Oh no,_ I could just hear myself saying, _he changed his face with magic_.

“I hope you weren’t in too much trouble with Seawoll,” Nightingale said out of nowhere.

“What?”

She gave me a dry smile. “He was quite audible as I was walking out.”

“Oh, that.” I knew that Seawoll had been right, was the worst part of it—I had no business sharing the name of a suspect, however tenuous, before the police had been able to so much as an interview. On the other hand, someone—something—was going around making a man like Coopertown murder his wife and baby, and it seemed like Nightingale was the only person who had a chance of doing something about it. “No, it was fine.”

“I don’t want to get you into difficulties,” she said. 

I looked down at my hands, then back up at her. “I want to help,” I said. “I want to help you figure out what’s going on, who’s causing this, and then I want to send them to prison.”

Nightingale looked at me a long moment, and then nodded. “Yes, thank you, Peter,” she said. “That will do very nicely.”

*** 

After everything that had happened earlier, Lesley wanted to go out that night. “To a movie,” she said. “I don’t want to just stay in and think.”

I agreed, without needing too much persuasion. I’d also been given a day and a half off to stay off the radar, and I wasn’t enthusiastic about hanging around the station house all night either. 

Of course, finding a movie wasn’t as easy as it should have been, but I let Lesley persuade me into _Sherbet Lemons_ without too much difficulty. It wasn’t what I’d have chosen for myself, but it was distracting, and Lesley looked a bit better as we walked out. “Want to hit the pub?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said.

“You’re buying, then,” she said. “You owe me an apology for dragging me into the Coopertown thing in the first place.”

She wanted to stop by Belgravia to pick up the phone charger she’d forgotten at her desk, first. It was out of our way, but it was a nice enough evening, and I only grumbled a little as we walked over.

I forgot my complaining when we walked into the bullpen and saw Nightingale sitting at Stephanopolous’s desk. Nightingale was sitting facing us as we came in, and I could see a large bruise darkening on her cheek, under the scrape from that morning.

“Are you ok?” I asked. “What happened?”

Stephanopolous glared at me. “I’m trying to take Ms. Nightingale’s statement, if you don’t mind, Grant.”

“I’m fine,” Nightingale assured me.

Lesley was frowning at both of them. “Was there another murder?” she asked.

“No,” Stephanopolous said, annoyed. “But when a witness of a murder in the morning gets into a fight the same night, we kind of have to take an interest.”

“You were in a fight?” I asked Nightingale.

“It was not my intention,” she said primly.

“Seawoll told you just this morning to stay away from crime scenes,” Stephanopolous said.

“I assure you, Sergeant, that I did not go looking for a crime scene,” said Nightingale. “I just wanted to get some supper.”

Stephanopolous looked sharply at us, but didn’t shoo us away, so we got to hear the whole story. It had apparently started with Nightingale feeling like a curry, something that even Seawoll probably couldn’t blame her for. She’d gone to a local place and had been eating quietly by herself when a woman at the next table apparently just lost it. “The waiter brought her daughter the wrong dish,” Nightingale said. “Or, at least, that’s what she started yelling.”

According to Nightingale, something had caught her attention just before the woman blew up, although when Stephanopolous pressed, she wouldn’t say exactly what. Regardless, it meant that she was paying attention when the woman had shoved the waiter down onto the table and started trying to strangle him.

“Several people stepped in,” she said. “I just happened to be the closest.”

Stephanopolous was watching her closely. “So you separated them?”

“It was somewhat confused,” Nightingale said, which was a big red flag to anyone who’d been a copper for as long as Stephanopolous had.

“Were you aware,” she asked, “that Ms. Clyfford has threatened to press assault charges against you? She claims that you threw her to the ground and held her down for several minutes.”

“She was trying to strangle the gentleman to death,” Nightingale said mildly.

“Nevertheless,” said Stephanopolous. “Restraining her was not your job. And she says that you used a not insignificant amount of force. Apparently she has a bad back, which has been significantly aggravated.” 

“I may have helped pry her off the poor man,” said Nightingale, “But I was several feet away from her after that. As I’m quite sure the others who were present can attest.”

From Stephanopolous’s frustrated look, I was pretty sure that they already had. It wasn’t the look of a copper determined to make a case against someone, though, just one who was trying by force of habit. “Like that means anything,” she grumbled. “Just because you have—alternative resources—doesn’t mean you can do whatever you like, you know,” she said. Nightingale stayed silent. After a minute, Stephanopolous sighed. “Someone will be in touch,” she said. “Try not to get involved in any more crimes for at least a day or two.”

“I have absolutely no intentions of looking for trouble,” Nightingale said. I could tell that Stephanopolous believed it as little as I did, but there wasn’t really much more she could do about it.

“Go home, then,” said Stephanopolous. She looked at the two of us. “Both of you too. At least get out of here before Seawoll sees you getting mixed up in all this.” 

So we did. By then, we’d changed our minds about the pub, and so we headed straight back to the section house.

Fortunately, even without the drink, I didn’t remember my dreams that night.

**

I cornered Lesley in the canteen the next morning and told her that I thought Coopertown had murdered Skirmish. She looked at me like I was crazy. “Because of the dog?”

“Not exactly,” I said. But of course she wasn’t satisfied with that, so I ended up explaining the whole chain of reasoning, which left her a little green and both of us dubious about finishing our breakfasts.

“It’s not exactly conclusive,” she said.

“I know that,” I said. “But do you have a better lead?”

She allowed as how the murder team did not, at the moment, have a multitude of promising threads to pull on. “Just take a look,” I said. “Check the CCTV in the area. He didn’t have a car available, so he must have taken some kind of public transit. Maybe you’ll get lucky and catch him on it.”

She wasn’t convinced, but she agreed to try, if only to shut me up. I headed off for another day of proactively making a valuable contribution.

I was just wrapping up my day when Leslie called back. “I hate you, you know,” she started. 

“You found him, then,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Leslie. “He boarded the 24 bus at Leicester Square, not ten minutes after the murder. We have him on the camera. Definitely Coopertown.”

“You tell Seawoll yet?” I asked.

“Course I told Seawoll,” said Leslie. “I like this job, Peter, and I intend to keep it.”

Of course she had. “And what did he say?”

She sighed. “He cursed a lot, and then asked why I’d checked, and then yelled some more. Anyway, it’s not exactly conclusive, but he’s pretty happy to have Coopertown for it.”

And there, it seemed, it rested. Nobody had proof that Coopertown had murdered Skirmish, but there was enough circumstantial evidence to make it seem likely enough, especially given that we had eyewitnesses of him killing his own family a few days later. No other leads turned up in the Skirmish murder, and after a few days, the murder team moved on to a new case.

There were still plenty of unanswered questions. The main one, which nobody seemed to be able to figure out, was _why_ Coopertown had apparently murdered three people. We had a potential motive, however tenuous, for Skirmish, but why had he killed his wife and child?

There were more questions that I still had, even if nobody else except Nightingale cared about them. How had Coopertown—who according to Nightingale shouldn’t have known anything about magic—done the spell that destroyed his own face? And what—or, as I was increasingly starting to wonder, who—had made him do it?

 


End file.
